POET’S BACK DOOR

A debut volume of poetry celebrates life in America.

Many a poet has been inspired to write by the beauty of the American West. Tidwell stands proudly among them: “When you experience the grandeur of the Rockies / You will find a peace nothing else can achieve / The valleys and snowcapped peaks paint a picture / That will continually make your memories richer.” The first section of this collection features many praises of Western landscapes as well as selections like “The Lawman” and “The Sheriff” that effectively evoke the long tradition of cowboy poetry. But the author’s verse touches on many topics: Subsequent sections include poems on travel, friendship, loss, and the many emotions related to love. There is an entire section dedicated to Tidwell’s patriotic feelings, with poems about 9/11, military service, and the country’s growing partisan divide. He finds inspiration in quotidian tasks as well, as in this vivid, unexpectedly melancholic poem about doing laundry post-divorce: “Finding out she wasn’t happy meant ending this show / That’s how I ended up in the town of Durango / Doing laundry just once a week is now something, I hate / 10 sets of socks, shorts and t shirts is such an ugly state.” There is an antiquated quality to the work, both in terms of form and content. (The first poem, a romantic ode to the Native Americans of the West, is called “Red Brothers.”) The poems are almost all composed of quatrains featuring AABB end rhymes. But Tidwell is not a counter of syllables and his meter tends to be all over the place, as in “Cousin Peggy”: “The mother of four, business owner and much more / Teaching her kids to seek the truth and evil to abhor / A mom with little people she had to nurture and feed / And with Heavenly help she met all their daily needs.” The poems appear only on the odd-numbered pages of this nearly 240-page volume. The even-numbered pages are either blank or feature stock images related to the topics of the poems. This ambitious collection will likely be of interest to the author’s loved ones and friends. But the work is a bit too uneven to be of interest to a larger poetry audience.

A wide-ranging yet monochrome collection of rhyming poems.